Portrait d'un jeune homme au crâne

Frans Hals painted this in the late 1620s in Haarlem, a Dutch city grown rich on cloth and beer, where his portraits of pleased, prosperous citizens were in demand. This is not one of them. It is a vanitas, a reminder that the good life ends. A young man in a red feathered cap turns and gestures out at us with one hand while cradling a skull in the other, as if caught mid-sentence about how little time there is. For a long time people wanted him to be Hamlet with poor Yorick's skull, but there is no real link to Shakespeare. What carries the picture is the speed of the brush. The cap, the sleeve, the fingers are all laid in with quick, loose strokes that Hals barely tidied, so the paint itself looks alive next to the bone. It hangs now in the National Gallery in London.